Soft and Poetic: Whisperlike Brushstrokes on Canvas

Stone Hill Center, an addition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, has galleries for special exhibitions.Credit
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Retreat or plunge in? Artists contending with modern life can escape the bewildering tumult into transcendent realms of formal beauty and philosophical contemplation, or they can actively participate, injecting transformational energies into the social flux.

This summer at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in this bucolic town, the escapist option is beautifully displayed in two forms: a blissful exhibition of late-19th- and early-20th-century paintings and a serene new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

The exhibition, “Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly,” was inspired in part by something the eminently quotable James McNeill Whistler once said: “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.”

With that in mind, Marc Simpson, the Clark’s curator of American art, has gathered 41 paintings, dating from the 1870s to 1919, by 15 Americans. The works are mostly landscapes in which painterly gestures, sharp edges and other signs of technical effort are minimized. Quiet, blurrily luminous scenes of natural calm by Whistler, George Inness, John Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, among others, appear like mirages, as though they’d magically materialized on canvas.

Whistler was the most radical and the most influential. His small harbor scenes, “Nocturnes,” from the 1870s — three are in the exhibition — are so dark that they may look entirely abstract at first. But as you spend time with them, they appear increasingly realistic. Boats and distant buildings become discernible, and the impression of deep space, from which scattered points of light radiate, becomes amazingly palpable. The paintings create extraordinarily effective illusions of what the world looks like on a moonless, foggy night.

That Japanese art inspired Whistler’s elegant formal economy is well known. It influenced others too. Twachtman’s study in muted greens “Arques-la-Baille” (1885), with deftly painted reeds standing out against smooth, receding planes of pond water, a hazy hillside and pearlescent gray sky, is the Western equivalent of satori.

Photo

"Arques-la-Baille" (1885) is John Twachtman's study in muted greens.Credit
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whistler’s concern with visual perception connects him to the French Impressionists. Unlike those radical empiricists, however, who favored sunny, well-lighted subjects, Whistler had a preference for the liminal and the nocturnal, which add a dimension of mystery. A penchant for poetic effects animates most of the exhibition’s other artists as well.

Inness conceived of his painting as a spiritual practice. A follower of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Inness created landscapes that seem illuminated from within by both natural and pantheistic light. See “Hazy Morning, Montclair” (1893), a picture of a nondescript tree in a flat grassy field. It seems drab at first and has a curiously ugly mottled surface. Then the cool white light of the not yet risen sun starts to glow beyond the farther trees and the edge of a house to the left, and a whole richly spacious world comes into view. You don’t have to be a mystic to feel a sense of spiritual awakening.

Besides being visually engaging, the exhibition raises, without definitively answering, intriguing conceptual questions. One is about photography. Many of the show’s paintings give the impression of under- or overexposed and poorly focused photographs. Were the soft painters influenced by photography? Did they copy photographs or otherwise use them as visual sources? Might they have seen their works as analogous to a kind of spirit photography? That the show includes some exquisite Whistlerian landscapes painted by the photographer Edward Steichen early in his career makes these questions all the more compelling.

Then there is the gender issue. The show includes no female artists, but women are subjects of several paintings. William Merritt Chase’s gorgeous, mostly red painting of a young woman relaxing in profile in an armchair is undoubtedly a hedonistic response to his friend Whistler’s famous portrait of his formidably upright mother.

Gender is most conspicuously at issue in the works of Dewing, who painted young women in neo-Classical garb in vaporous pastoral environments. These women are fashionable beauties, but they are also nature goddesses.

From today’s perspective his paintings may seem laughably sexist and vapidly decorative. But consider the times, a period of explosive industrial and economic growth driven by ruthlessly ambitious men. Dewing’s paintings — and soft painting in general — might represent an alternative way of being, a “feminine” state of sensuous receptivity, soulful indolence and communion with nature.

So, while soft painting may seem superficially disengaged from gritty social reality, a deeper view might interpret it as a cry for attention from the repressed feminine side of America’s male-dominated collective psyche. That, at least, is one way to account for the tantalizing effect of this exhibition.

It will not be lost on many visitors that the Clark’s verdant setting is much in tune with the pastoral vision of the soft painters. That is affirmed by the new addition to the 140-acre campus, the Ando-designed Stone Hill Center, which houses an art conservation laboratory, an outdoor cafe and small galleries for special exhibitions.

Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. Outside, angled concrete walls imprinted with wood-grain textures visually break up the monolithic boxcar form of the main structure and support a triangular porch that juts out over the hill. Because the building is set into the hill — its lower half buried on one side and fully exposed to northern light on the other — and because of its low profile, it seems gently integrated into the landscape. It is a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years.

(A second phase of expansion, also designed by Mr. Ando, will entail a larger building and a reflecting pool. To be constructed mostly underground, that building will have extensive exhibition galleries and a conference center.)

Indoors, the Stone Hill Center spaces are cool and nicely proportioned, and the two galleries — on either side of an open hallway, totaling 2,500 square feet — seem at once intimate and generously spacious. Windows and a doorway at one end open onto a wood-floored porch that should be for Zen monks only.

This summer the galleries are displaying a modest reply to the soft painting exhibition: a selection of works by John Singer Sargent on one side and Winslow Homer on the other, all from the museum’s permanent collection. Both artists practiced the opposite of soft painting (though Sargent did do some soft painting, as an example reveals in “Breath on Glass”).

Sargent’s two small views of Venice — indoors and outdoors — and his exotic, Orientalist painting of a woman in white robes in a white temple inhaling fumes of burning ambergris exhibit a painterly virtuosity that the soft painters avoided. Homer’s late paintings of roiling ocean waters have a churning, erotic energy that would have given those prim masters of self-effacing hypersensitivity nightmares.

“Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly” is at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, Mass.; (413) 458-2303 or clarkart.edu, through Oct. 19.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page E28 of the New York edition with the headline: Soft and Poetic: Whisperlike Brushstrokes on Canvas. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe